Does Performance Affect Attendance at NFL Home Games?

I built an NFL attendance vs performance dashboard to practice real data prep in Excel and analysis in Tableau, with an eye toward the kind of work I want to do for an NFL team. The dataset covers 2021 through 2024 and includes home, road, and overall attendance, win percentage, and a separate stadium capacity table. To speed up the messy parts I used GPT-5 Thinking as a parsing helper. I fed it full league tables and it returned clean CSVs and reshaped everything into a long format for easier calculations. I did quality assurance in Excel, then in Tableau I joined the long attendance table to the capacity table on Team, created calculated fields for Home GMs, Home TOTAL, and Win PCT, and calculated Home % Filled as Home TOTAL divided by Home GMs times Team Capacity. The story includes division views and an all-teams overview with filters and annotations so people can explore season over season.

Key takeaways from the analysis:
Even though a game may be announced as a sellout, that does not guarantee a completely full building. With Covid restrictions lifted in 2021 there was still visible caution in some cities and states that season, and most teams saw a lift in attendance from 2021 to 2022. Performance is a strong indicator of attendance in some places, especially in the AFC South during this window, but many other factors also matter, including weather, lingering post-pandemic concerns, and whether tickets can be resold easily. Some markets are more elastic than others, which shows up as bigger swings in percent filled when results or conditions change.

In the future, I want to extend the view back before the pandemic to benchmark each club’s pre-2020 baseline and study how quickly different markets reverted to that baseline. I would also try to bring in game-day weather, secondary market data, and ticket prices to measure elasticity by market more directly. For this version I focused on 2021 to 2024 because the teams have not changed cities or stadiums in that span, which made it possible to build a clean datasets in a few hours. The interactive Tableau story at the bottom lets you dig into the divisions, compare teams, and see how stadium fill and winning moved together across the last four seasons. (activate full-screen mode at the bottom right)